There are several industrial uses for ovens. For example, in the semi-conductor industry, part of the manufacturing process for microchips includes curing the microchip in an oven. Like many industries, microchip manufacturing relies on manufacturing a large amount of individual parts. It is desirable to look for methods and mechanisms that can handle vast amounts of parts at one time and reduce the amount of floor space needed to perform a particular function in the manufacturing process.
In many manufacturing processes, the product is moved throughout a system in an assembly line-type manner. A material handling system moves the product along the manufacturing process. The material handling system may be a conveyor system, for example.
When a product is being moved in a conveyor-type system, it is desirable to keep the product moving rather than stopping the product in a particular location in the line in order for an operation to be performed on the product. Stopping products at a particular point in the line can have an effect of backing up the assembly line upstream to the stopped portion and creating a gap in the downstream delivery of product. Thus, it is desirable to, as much as possible, keep products moving along the assembly line.
When, for various reasons, products need to be stopped, it is, of course, desirable to keep the operation causing the product to be stopped to be accomplished quickly so that the product can continue to move throughout along the assembly line system. A metric used to measure a through-put capacity of a particular apparatus used in a manufacturing process is referred to as units-per-hour or “UPH”. In general, it is desirable for an apparatus to have relatively high UPH, and, thus, there is always a need in the industry to generate products that have an ever-higher UPH. At the same time, in order to reduce floor space and thus cost in a process, it is desirable to reduce the footprint of an apparatus in the manufacturing process. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a method and apparatus that can offer a greater UPH for processing products and/or also a reduced footprint from previous ovens.